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Andy joined Carpenter Oak & Woodland in 2005, to help the company provide a greater focus on customer service, marketing and sales. Andy’s background is varied indeed – helping him to bring a wide range of skills to the team. An avid lover of carpentry, Andy has also spent time in furniture restoration and conservation – something he still enjoys as a hobby.
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I guess when I’m asked at parties what I do, I would say that I help to construct timber-frame buildings. The truth is that our skill – as a company – is really what we call ‘timber engineering’, and that our main business is constructing buildings.
We say timber engineering, because we are capable of doing things with timber that others would flee from, screaming loudly. For example, we can span far wider distances than many companies believe is even possible – and yes, our stuff stays up.
So we do get asked to do some pretty unusual things. Top of the list must be our slight excursion into building ancient war machines. I say slight, because it is slight for us, but we’ve probably got more experience of this than any other company – having built a few now, such as the trebuchet at Warwick Castle.
The ballista was built for a TV documentary – for the BBC and the Discovery Channel – called ‘Building the Impossible’. Good title: many of the things built by the ancients are incredibly well-engineered and refined – and not at all easy to replicate. The ballista proved no exception.
Here’s a short video showing the planning, design and construction of the ballista.
This video shows highlights of the building of the ballista – and its successful firing.
It took a lot of hard work, planning and construction to create the ballista. Along the way, we found out a lot that was – well, not new, but had been lost for thousands of years. A good example is the rope that is used to put the throwing arm under tension. It had originally been made from animal sinews. It was understandable to think of this as antiquated, as it would be very time-consuming to make and require thousands of animals to surrender their muscle tissue. Plus, haven’t we made great advances in similar materials? You would think so. So, a modern replacement was chosen – but was as similar to tensile strength as possible to the Roman sinew-rope. It wasn’t until we placed the rope on the ballista, tightened it and left it overnight that we found out why – the real reason why the Romans had used animal sinew. All modern ropes slacken off in the cold of the night and damp of the early morning, rendering the ballista hard to fire – there’s little tension left. Sinew rope performs in the opposite way – it tightens further, creating more tension and making the ballista fire further. Smart stuff.
That’s just one example – the entire process was fraught with stumbling blocks that we weren’t able to see in advance. A lot of what we knew was right, and enabled us to build the ballista, but a lot of what we knew was just plain wrong.
We had good people – great people, actually – working on this, so we resolved the issues and built it. We then successfully fired it, though firing it did cause damage to the timber that needs repair. (We saw after it was built that the damage would be caused due to an issue in the plans, but we decided to fire anyway – and we’re glad we did!)
So now, we’re selling it on eBay, to free up space in our Scotland timber yard. Our hope is that it is restored and goes to a good home – somewhere it can be appreciated by others; where we can marvel at the sheer genius of the thinking behind these awesome war machines.
Of course, if you want to lay siege to a neighbouring castle, it may be just the ticket too.
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